This edited volume examinesmanele (sing.manea), an urban Romanian song-dance ethnopop genre that combines local traditional and popular music with Balkan and Middle Eastern elements. The genre is performed primarily by male Romani musicians at weddings and clubs and appeals especially to Romanian and Romani youth. It became immensely popular after the collapse of communism, representing for many the newly liberated social conditions of the post-1989 world. Butmanele have also engendered much controversy among the educated and professional elite, who view the genre as vulgar and even alien to the Romanian national character. The essays collected here examine the manea phenomenon as a vibrant form of cultural expression that engages in several levels of social meaning, all informed by historical conditions, politics, aesthetics, tradition, ethnicity, gender, class, and geography.

Margaret Beissinger teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Her research and writing focuses on Balkan cultures and oral traditions, oral epic, and Romani traditional culture and music-making, with an emphasis on southern Romania, where she has undertaken extensive fieldwork both before and after the 1989 revolution, especially among Romani musicians.

Sperana Rdulescu is an ethnomusicologist at the Peasant Museum in Bucharest and associate professor at the National University of MusicBucharest. A specialist onlutar music, she is author of numerous books and articles and supervises the Ethnophonie series (twenty-five CDs so far) that features traditional musics of Romania.

Anca Giurchescu was a dance researcher at the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore, Bucharest, for 25 years, settling in Denmark and continuing her research with the Danish National Council for Humanities and the Danish Folklore Archives in Copenhagen. She founded the theory and method of structural analysis for traditional dance.

Chapter 1: Music, Dance, Performance: A Descriptive Analysis ofManele
Sperana Rdulescu and Anca Giurchescu
Chapter 2: A History of theManea: The 19th to the Mid-20th Century
Costin Moisil
Chapter 3: Actors and Performance
Anca Giurchescu and Sperana Rdulescu
Chapter 4: How the Music ofManele is Structured
Sperana Rdulescu
Chapter 5: VillageManele:An Urban Genre in Rural Romania
Margaret Beissinger
Chapter 6: Manele and Regional Parallels: Ethnopop in the Balkans
Margaret Beissinger
Chapter 7:Manele and the Underworld
Adrian chiop
Chapter 8: Boyar in the Helicopter: Power, Parody, and Carnival inManea Performances
Victor Stoichi
Chapter 9: Turbo-Authenticity: An Essay about Manelism
Vintil Mihilescu
Epilogue
Sperana Rdulescu